Category Archives: Not Dead Yet: Print Reviews

This Goreletter department features Michael Arnzen’s critical review of books, magazines, and other printed matter. A preference is given to quirky titles, independent press books, and other hard-to-find publications.

The horror genre seems to attract two dominant personality types: those who love the emotional thrill of fear and shock for its own sake, and deep thinkers who enjoy musing over the alternative possibilities promised by the Unknown. On the latter score, some authors approach the ideas of life, death, and the great beyond with impressive sophistication and scholarly research that often supersedes their fictional imaginings. Stephen King’s non-fiction titles (Danse Macabre, On Writing) are seminal works of criticism. Anne Rice’s musings on the church are followed by many. Dean Koontz wrote the book on Writing Popular Fiction. China Mieville writes Marxist criticism. HP Lovecraft wrote a virtual bible for authors of the weird tale (no, not the Necronomicon; I’m talking about his essay, “The Supernatural in Horror Literature”). And, of course, Poe’s criticism is oft-cited in courses that study theories of the short story. The history of scary authorship almost requires a philosophical contemplation of the abyss. Call it a “dark theology.” It’s worth gazing into.
Two notable books in this subgenre were published in the independent press this year that strongly remind us of the serious business of horror and spirituality: Dark Awakenings by Matt Cardin and The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. The latter is a fantastically written philosophical treatise advocating pessimism about the human existence. With all the sophistication of a doctoral thesis in Philosophy, Ligotti argues, essentially, an idea he’s been employing in his scary fiction for many years: that man lies to himself about existence all the time, that other unseen and unknowable forces may be pulling our puppet strings, and that THOSE STRINGS might themselves be a construct of our imaginations, because our existence could be meaningless after all.

Reminiscent of Emil Cioran’s wonderfully depressing book of aphorisms, The Trouble With Being Born, Ligotti’s “Conspiracy” is a twisted celebration of pessimism — at times laugh-out-loud funny in its bold disregard for any hope for humanity and other times downright convincing in its unflinching suggestion that life is a “malignantly useless” enterprise, and that suffering is inherent to this existential condition. Ligotti’s philosophy is three levels beyond atheism, and requires a strong-minded reader to really accept his position. Yet I loved Ligotti’s book, because it so smartly builds an audacious case in support of the idea that human extinction might not be such a bad thing, and he does so in such an earnest and serious voice that the prose, simply, convinces. A downer on downers, a love letter to the suicidal, this book challenges our assumptions in a way that I wish more writers would try to do.

I won’t say more, because the book deserves a more thorough review than I can give here. Look it up at Hippocampus Press and see if, well, if you can handle it.
If so, don’t stop there. Pick up another book just as engaging, but whose net is more widely cast in its focus on belief and cosmic dread, called Dark Awakenings by Matt Cardin.

Cardin’s project as a writer is vast — and he seems just as interested in what it is that makes us monkeys squeal as he is in what lies beyond in the cosmos. It is rare to come across a writer as earnestly focused on this sort of thing as Matt Cardin (who, incidentally is also a scholar OF Ligotti — and in many ways follows in his shadows).

Dark Awakenings offers generous heapings of fiction and “dark theology”: there are seven high quality Weird Tales (in the proper sense of that phrase, as many of them are eldritch stories, directly or indirectly related to the Cthulhu Mythos) and three artful, multi-part works of literary criticism on the diverse religious and philosophical elements of supernatural tales (from the Bible to Romero films). My copy — which you can special-order from the quality publishers at Mythos Books — not only contained the 120,000 words of prose in a quality hardcover package, but also even came with an audio CD of dark music (much of it driven by creepy synthesizers and voice samples of creepy lines from various film and radio programs — ultimately sounding something like quotes from Aleister Crowley’s dream journal) composed by Cardin’s alter-ego, Daemonyx, called “Night of the Daemon.” I enjoyed this multigenre approach. You get a hefty bundle of “awakenings” that really reward the experience with a sustained study of the limits and hopes of religion, the phenomenological experience of dread, the undercurrent of primordial fear in everyday life, and the figurative and literal meanings of the supernatural.

In other words, you get entertainment with serious intellectual heft.

One might presume that a book should only come at you with one approach — i.e., that a reader can only hold a work of fiction, or one of non-fiction, in their hands at once. And it’s true that many lesser writers might produce something schizoid if they attempted this dual approach to dread. But the exact opposite is true in Cardin’s case: these two genres of writing inform each other in an interesting way, so that by the time you finish the stories and turn to the criticism, you are eager to learn more about the writer’s worldview; and when you get to the end, you’ve learned so much more that you want to turn right back to the beginning and start reading the fiction all over again. And it does reward a second read: Cardin is deft at writing in both genres, because he writes with such a centered focus.

Cardin’s writing is at once scholarly and imaginatively rich, but throughout this book you can’t help but pick up the author’s sense of conviction about the material and his respect for the gutsy legacy of the genre. It is not that he preaches about spirituality; instead, he reasons with his audience and appeals to their sense of wonder…and then leads us into a voluntary contemplation of the abyss. No, not a contemplation, that’s too weak a word for Cardin’s project. Instead, it is a full bore immersion into oblivion, where neither reason nor emotion can really save you, and you have to transcend or succumb to a larger, sublime reality.

Cardin, following in Lovecraft’s tradition, is more interested in crafting and musing over the cosmic horrors that threaten to render us insignificant…when they aren’t otherwise threatening to lash our heads off with a tentacled thwack. Rife with dream imagery, and one curious eye flittering about the liminal edge of the abyss, Cardin’s storytelling is effective in its tricky balancing act of spiritual curiosity and primordial dread. Some of it will be a bit philosophically pensive for some readers’ taste. This sort of writing may appeal mostly to fans who already share the author’s worldview. It’s somewhat telling, for example, that the opening story, “Teeth,” is written in first person from the perspective a grad student in philosophy. Not all readers will be able to identify with that sort of protagonist, who seems a modern echo of Lovecraft’s classic archetype of the scholar-driven-to-insanity-by-indulging-his-relentless-intellectual-curiosity. But then again, what reader can’t help but see himself mirrored by the narrator of “Teeth,” when he peers into a colleague’s notebook and finds himself pulled into the “obscene infinitude” of a mandala filled with “trillions of teeth” that begin to chew away at his mind? That’s >our< mind being consumed by the story as we read. And all the stories are engaging in this same manner.

While Cardin's fiction remains potent, the lengthy critical essays in this volume are really important contributions to horror scholarship, and are more grounded in literary history and criticism than Ligotti's book, which draws mostly from existential philosophers — some long forgotten. Cardin's first essay surveys a history of the angel and demon in canonical fiction, opening the reader's eyes to the precedents for these figures in contemporary literature, and revealing their meanings beyond the dominant Christian iconography we find all too familiar. An essay on George Romero's nihilistic Living Dead film series explores the way the cannibalistic zombie icon raises issues related to the body and spirit (and fans of Kim Paffenroth's Stoker-award winning book, Gospel of the Living Dead, will feel amply rewarded by Cardin’s essay). Cardin’s collection culminates with a close reading of the appearance of monstrous chaos — and the problem of “anti-closure” — in the biblical book of Isaiah. All three essays echo one another’s central theme, while illuminating the problems the horror genre has been posing to mankind and meaning alike for centuries, in the process.

Either of these two books would make great fodder in a course in the Philosophy of Horror and Belief. You don’t need a professor to give you the syllabus; enroll yourself in these books, and see what lessons their teeth have to teach you.

I’ve also been having way too much fun trolling around amazon for weird discoveries, and I have compiled a few other funky lists, like the Goofy Gory Gifts Galore list and other novelty lists. I’m apparently a listmaniac.

Amazon Listmania Collects Books Reviewed

After many years of neglect, I have updated my author profile on amazon.com, where you can find more weirdness and links to many of my books and anthologies. Since amazon now features some of my stuff in their kindle store, and because I am likely to begin publishing The Goreletter for Kindle readers as well as web browsers, I have made gorelets an amazon affiliate, and I have been cleaning up their database when it comes to Arnzen titles by uploading book covers or making corrections. Your reviews and tags on amazon.com are appreciated.

The book, essentially, was an assignment. All its contributors were challenged to read Sigmund Freud’s seminal essay on horror aesthetics called “The Uncanny,” and then write a fresh fictional interpretation of the ideas within it, in order to explore what the Uncanny might mean 100 years later, in the 21st century. The goal: “to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps.”

If you’re not familiar with Freud’s “Uncanny,” the introduction by Ra Page is an excellent survey of its key components in its own right, discussing how Freud provided a “literary template…a shopping list of shivers” that horror writers have managed to return to again and again over the past century. That template includes such icons as “the double” (aka doppelganger), living dolls, evil robots, recurring numbers, dismembered limbs that move on their own accord, animals that speak, the living dead, and more. Page explains the meaning of Freud’s essay in one of the most clear and careful ways I’ve ever seen in print. Thus, the introduction is a must-read, and it establishes the premise of the book perfectly.

What happens, though, is that the reader is put into an evaluative frame-of-mind, constantly asking themselves “How is this writer working with the source material?” and “Have they contributed something original to the concept?” This almost lowers the book to the status of a writing contest, of sorts, as the reader will inevitably begin to compare each author’s treatment side by side, looking for the best interpretation. This is fine, but it also makes us less susceptible to the emotional impact of the stories, since we’re inherently put into this judgmental distance from the worlds imagined by the authors. The best writers, however, thoroughly succeed in pulling us into their haunted characters’ worlds, forgetting about the “uncanny” altogether so we can experience the tale in an immediate fashion.

When discussing the tales in The New Uncanny, Page interestingly notes that the majority of the stories feature either the double or the doll most often. This is true, but it does not diminish the quality of the writing. There are “playful” types of dolls chosen, like Adam Marek’s “Tamaogotchi” or Nicholas Royle’s “The Dummy” — but even A.S. Byatt’s more traditional children doll story is thoroughly enjoyable as a work of terror. One of my favorite tales in the collection, however, transcends the usage of dolls AND doubles, and manages to be a gritty little gross-out number, to boot: Matthew Holness‘ “Possum” is a thoroughly raw and psychologically scarring story about a puppeteer who uses an animal head to scare children (among other things) — it is unsettling because it uses an unreliable narrator in an unstable manner, and the icing on the cake is that you can never quite tell if Holness is earnest in his narration or if he is playing the role of Garth Merenghi writing parodic horror fiction — which would be laughably outrageous if the writing weren’t this talented. I loved it.

Another quirky original is Jane Rogers’ “Ped-o-Matique” — about a foot massaging device that seems to have a mind of its own — and the story gives us a great psychological portrait of a woman “frozen” in place. To say much more about any of these stories would give too much away. (Though this particular story is online here!).

Because writers are all offering variation on a theme, without knowing what each other are up to, there is some redundancy among the stories. Gerard Woodward‘s “The Underhouse” — about a man who constructs an uncanny “mirror image” room in his basement, for example, is an ingenious story, told well. But it echoes Ramsey Campbell‘s opening tale, “Double Room,” in which a hotel guest discovers that his every action is echoed by identical sounds in a neighboring room, but with a hostile intent. These “mirror room” stories feel “strangely familiar” in their own right. But the redundancy isn’t too worrisome; the latter shows why Campbell is a master of psychological suspense, and while the idea is a little too similar to Woodward’s, it is more chilling, while Woodward’s is a wee bit more clever and whimsical in its conception. Drawing comparisons like these is part of that “distance” I was talking about in the outset of this review: the structure of the book both enables and gets in the way of its enjoyment. But on the whole, it is an excellent study in the Uncanny, and a fun — albeit disturbing — read of new British horror fiction. Compared to many anthologies in the horror genre, this one has a very clear literary purpose, and I recommend it very highly.

In fact, if you’re a teacher of literature, this would make for an excellent textbook/course. I actually assigned this book in a recent course I taught in Psychological Horror fiction at Seton Hill University. I asked students to review a story from the book on my other blog, The Popular Uncanny, so read that for a ‘double’ review! (These include MANY spoilers, however, so read the book before you read their thoughts).

Sorry for the length of this section, but I’m making up for lost time. This time around I offer four three “flash” reviews of books that are quite effective because they inexplicably feel “autobiographical” in some way, despite being entirely, totally, and thankfully made up.

>> Chimeric Machines by Lucy A. Snyder
Snyder is a massively talented writer — the sort who knows how to make you take a gulp when you hit the ending of a story or poem — and this poetry collection made me gulp with awe on virtually every page. Although her poetry/fiction collection Sparks and Shadows remains the best introduction to this writer’s work in print, Chimeric Machines is her best work of poetry to date, because it is the most personal and — as usual for her writing — profound in its observations of the emotional undercurrents and potential for fantastic transformation in everyday life. The title made me thing the collection would be rife with fantastical creatures but this is deep poetry; literary writing, much of it seemingly autobiographical, tinged with a fantastic worldview. In these poems, which often turn whismical — as in the poem where the narrator vomits a squid in an exceptionally visceral moment — even the squid carries weighty ominous meaning. Many are dark, such as “The Monster Between the Sparks” (which is the space you see between the stars), and chill you where you thought you warm. Others explore hopelessness — but with a tiny spark of hope underneath the snuff of the universe. With an introduction by Tom Piccirilli and collaborative contributions from Gary Braunbeck, many horror readers would enjoy the experience of this collection. This is not horror poetry, always, but it is something bigger, something simpler: just great poetry. Snyder’s Chimeric Machines deserves to win a literary award.
Available for about $10 from http://www.creativguypublishing.com

>> Don of the Dead by Nick Cato
I read this novel in advanced form, and it should be out very soon from Coscom Entertainment. Cato is the man who had the audacity to bring my absurd novelette, Licker, into print, mostly because he is simply a huge fan of horror-humor. His upcoming novel (his first?), Don of the Dead, is clearly a labor that reflects that same love of comedy and terror, mashing together the mob story genre with the zombie genre into a concept story that seemed pretty fresh and original to me, despite the dripping saturation of the genre with zombie fiction and film these days. I recently sent him an endorsement for the book, so allow me to simply say “I laughed a lot” and reblurbitate it: “It’s as if George Romero has eaten the brains of Mario Puzo, Martin Scorcese and Dave Barry and spit out fictional gold.” While this story is only likely to appeal to zombie and mob fans, I count myself among them, and recommend it to kindred spirits looking for a good Troma-styled romp. (And if you know what “Troma-styled” means, then you’re one of them). Available shortly fromhttp://www.coscomentertainment.com/webstore.html

>> Latter-Day Cipher by Latayne C. Scott
It’s not often that I read religious-oriented fiction, and I’m going to bet that most readers of The Goreletter haven’t even heard of this book. But Latter-Day Cipher (Moody Publishers, 2009), the first suspense novel from Latayne C. Scott, strikes me as a very bold step into some very challenging and original waters: the shadowy history of the Mormon church. In Latter-Day Cipher, a journalist is assigned to cover a series of bizarre (and I mean bizarre!) and gory murders in Utah, involving strange symbolic carvings discovered in the flesh of the victims and a 19th century document written entirely in code with ties to the Latter-Day Saints. Along the way, the Church of LDS tries to silence the publicity (sound familiar?) while a madman seems to be following archaic LDS religious practices quite literally. Scott uses fiction to explore what would happen if the early rite of “blood atonement” was still carried out today, while also realistically exploring the spiritual crises of her characters.

In the book’s afterword, Scott makes a case for the reality of “blood atonement” rituals, but I felt a little skeptical of >some< of this, given her own status (broadcast very clearly in the book) as a recent convert away from a long-held following of Mormon principles. The book seems to be constructing an argument against Mormonism in favor of Christianity as much as it is trying to tell a story that illustrates it. While Scott isn’t to blame, this undercurrent is why I usually don’t read books like these — because the writer’s agenda or ideology seems so close to the surface of the text that I have problems suspending disbelief. But this book manages to transcend such matters by raising such intriguing and unique questions. I have to say that Latter-Day Cipher is such a compelling and scary story that it stands on its own two feet as a proper psychological suspense novel: Scott’s deft and successful storytelling abilities — and her zeal for telling an original story while simultaneously investigating the historical realities of the Church — on top of all the weirdness that is everywhere apparent in the story — really won me over. I kept forgetting I was wearing my black skeptic’s hat as I read it. So if you’re tired of the usual serial killer fair, or if you want to see what Anne Rice really SHOULD be writing post-conversion, then this is a book you’ll want to read. Take a look at the neat book trailer and other information at the author’s website: http://www.latayne.com/

Late last year, Wonder Entertainment released a special collector’s edition of Thomas Ligotti’s short story “The Frolic” in a book that comes bundled with a DVD — a 24 minute adaptation of that story directed by Jacob Cooney. Get it soon, because this product is limited to 1000 copies, and there are signed editions available. Remarkably, this is the very first cinematic adaptation of Ligotti’s work — and I must say, it’s an excellent treatment, co-scripted by Ligotti himself, intensely directed, and well-acted.

In my Goreletter reviews, I try to shine light on (mostly independent) “print” books because I feel that other media already get plenty of press and attention. At first I didn’t want to review The Frolic here because it is a new film, but the truth is this edition is more of a multimedia “story event” than your usual DVD release. Here you’ll get a full-blown celebration of the short story in a perfect-bound paperback which features not only a “newly revised version” of “The Frolic” (which originally appeared in Ligotti’s first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer), but also an eyebrow-raising introduction by the author, the complete screenplay for the adaptation by Ligotti and his screenwriting partner Brandon Trenz, and also enlightening interviews with everyone involved with the production of the film. Indeed, the book is everything that would normally appear on a “special features” section of an ordinary DVD, but here the printed word is so well-respected that it truly celebrates Ligotti’s mastery as a storyteller above all.

In a nutshell, the short story itself is about the chilling effect a child killer named “John Doe” has had on his prison house psychologist, David Munck. The killer, who justifies his actions by claiming he steals children away to some unearthly place so they can “frolic” together, disturbs Munck at the core, chipping away at his “objective” scientific worldview and replacing it with the supernatural. This foments into sheer terror when Doe refers to a “Colleen” during an interview — a name that sounds a lot like his own daughter’s, “Noreen,” a name Doe couldn’t possibly know. Ligotti does a masterful job of fracturing Munck’s world, from his faith in science and his career to his family relations, and much of the horror of the story comes from its inevitable, unstoppable conclusion.

The story artfully juxtaposes the doctor’s job in the adult world against the killer’s “work” in the world of children — and the characters lives intersect in artfully frightening ways. The film version does a great job capturing the creepy tension between the doctor and the killer by focusing on their parallels, without ever directly depicting any violence or gore, and the film changes the storyline just enough to make it stand strongly on its own two feet as a distinctive tale. The film, like the story, is dialogue-heavy, but it puts more focus on John Doe than it does the doctor and his family. However, the acting is so good (especially by John Doe played by Maury Sterling) that the tension between the characters mounts in a way that is highly reminiscent of the scenes in Silence of the Lambs, where Clarice Starling interviews Hannibal Lector: we can feel the prisoner’s great power despite his physical restraint, and we recognize his potential for evil in the glint of his knowing smile.

The bundled book gives excellent insight into Ligotti’s process. In his introduction, the author discusses the history of the story in a way that makes him sound almost embarrassed about its creation in 1982, yet proud of this cinematic treatment of it twenty five years later. He writes about his aversion to using “normal characters” as protagonists, which is the stock approach of contemporary domestic horror. Horror cinema, he argues, is inherently told from the viewpoint of normalcy, under some kind of threat by the abnormal, and this is how it engenders chills in the “normal” audience who are forced by films to confront it — but from a safe distance. In his fiction, Ligotti prefers to distort reality and present an abnormal worldview, tapping into the Weird with a capital W. But, in the 80s, Ligotti wanted to try his hand at one of these “normal” kinds of horror stories, just to see what it would happen if he sifted his proclivity for the aberrant through his abnormal lens. “The Frolic” was the result…and, he implies, the fact that he wrote a moderately “normal” horror story is precisely what makes it more adaptable to cinema than his other work.

In other words, “The Frolic” is Ligotti at his most conventional, if not accessible. It’s a great choice for the first adaptation of his work — but the story is no less disturbing because of it. Ligotti is very much a literary horror writer, if only in that he writes stories that are meant to be read and thought about in a way that cinema — which imagines the visual FOR us — does not allow. His stories are very much psychodramas of the dark fantastic, and since much the “psychodrama” is in the reader’s mind, the gaps and limits of language are imperative to staging it. The film version of The Frolic succeeds because it keeps the camera movement and other direction relatively low key, letting the dialogue of the actors and the written script drive the story. Anyone expecting the rapid editing and riotous gore of films like Hostel will be let down by this story, which is very “talky” — but since most of the story is a conversation between a mystified psychologist and an imprisoned child murderer, its tension and intrigue are high strung.

The film version differs just enough from the fiction version to make the set worth your while. Read the story first. Then watch the movie. Then read the screenplay and watch the special features. While the interview with Ligotti appears in the book, you won’t get any special appearances in the shape of cameos or interviews from the man (who seems to be so reclusive that he might well be the Thomas Pynchon of horror). If you like to see Ligotti’s imagination transformed into a visual medium, you might also be interested in the wonderful comic anthology from Fox Atomic, The Nightmare Factory; the first volume is excellent (and a second volume is coming soon).
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Order The Frolic ($45) signed collector’s edition

One of my old Army buddies, Eric Hoffman, went on to become a comedian, making a name for himself in the Chicago improv circuit and landing some good roles in TV and film (most notably, he parodied the John Travolta character from Pulp Fiction in My Big Fat Independent Movie). He even wrote for Bob & Dave’s “Mr. Show” for awhile. Well, now he’s an author, or co-author with Gary Rudoren, anyway, with the release of a great humor book: Comedy by the Numbers

I didn’t intend to review the book here, but it’s such a singularly funny read that I just have to. Sure, I’m biased. But don’t let that stop you from buying it.

Comedy by the Numbers is a mock “how to be popular” book — a technical guide to being the class clown or life of the party — with a catalog of 169 tried-and-true comedy “secrets” that are applicable to any stand-up routine, comedic screenplay, or water cooler conversation. The book parodies itself with mock authority, and as it enumerates all the cliches we’ve all seen before (#1 Animals Doing Things Humans Do, #16 Clowns, #36 Dwarves, Midgets and the Like), it catches you off-guard once in awhile by throwing in an absurd example of a tip here, or an excessive and over-the-top application of the secret there (like the list of “Clown Names Still Available for General Use” that includes names like “Cancerella, Spoogie, Stone Phillips and Blazey the Arsonist Clown”). Ever wanted to know how to properly shop for ventriloquist dummies? (Floppy legs are best). Which facial expressions are the best reactions to pain? (Sometimes it’s the “anger face,” sometimes it’s the “Indian shot arrow in the windpipe” face). What the best choices are for mimes who want to pretend to be trapped inside an object? (The back end of a horse costume always gets a laugh).

As you read along, you’ll find yourself caught up in all the stock examples from film comedies you’ve seen, and you’ll start to realize that Comedy by the Numbers still manages to be rather educational despite itself, by successfully surveying the genre and exposing all its formulas, strengths, and weaknesses. But beyond its content, the writing succeeds because the authors adopt a comedic perspective on their own material — at times excessively bragging about their own wit, at others pulling the rug out from under their own advice — and it’s a perspective that’s utterly contagious. By practicing what it preaches, the book charms, even when it fails to get a belly laugh by, say, going for an obvious fart joke. It’s an altogether fun, light-hearted and often “blue” (e.g. rated R) read, littered with hilarious illustrations and scenarios.

There’s a sense of nostalgia about this book, too — you can tell that these writers love old slapstick movies — and reading the book reminded me of Mad Magazine in its heyday. But I also found it inspirational (and I can’t believe I’m admitting this) for brainstorming my own writing ideas. For example, Secret #26 is “Death Portrayed as an Entity” which recommends writers put the grim reaper in their screenplay as “an ice cream salesman, bumbling civil servant, adorable doggie, crotchety librarian, or smarmy bellboy.” Hilarious. That got me thinking about other scenarios for a potential horror story in a similar vein (my notes say something cryptic like: “trial testimony by grim reaper arrested for indecent exposure”).

From the profane to the sacred…

When I pre-ordered Comedy by the Numbers from its publisher, McSweeney’s, I also picked up a curious little book called The New Sins by David Byrne (yes, that’s Mr. Big Suit of Talking Heads fame). The New Sins is another parody of textual format, but in this case it aims for the heavens instead of the belly: the book is quite literally a mock up of those freebie bilingual bibles you may have seen, with gold foil stamped lettering imprinted on a faux red-leather cover. Indeed, as a sort of public art performance, Byrne placed copies this book anonymously in hotel rooms during the 2001 Valencia Biennial. Now it’s available for sale, “with 9% more sin,” in a revised Spanish/English paperback edition.

Blasphemy? Not exactly. The New Sins fictionally purports to originate in newly-discovered ancient scrolls “that seem to imply a negation of vices and a missing set of sins.” It presents itself as a translation of the original tongue of a lost tribe from Croatia. It’s a fiction that presents itself as sacred text — and this may be the argument that Byrne wants to make about all sacred texts, too, though he means no disrespect: to Byrne fictional metaphors are potent and meaningful. Indeed, this book is a very poetic and philosophical musing on the spirit and the true meaning of suffering…and it’s quite funny, too. Byrne’s book is a thought experiment, and reading the various sins in its catalog (“charity, a sense of humor, beauty, ambition, thrift…” — yes, he turns what we assume to be virtue on its head) was an experience that for me felt like I was reading an expanded album cover from one of the Talking Heads’ old records…while sitting in a cathedral.

Byrne’s photos, collages and colorful artwork throughout the text are just as important as the writing. The intended meanings are impenetrable, yet they get you to reconsider what you already assume about vice and virtue and religious belief. Although it does make the argument that “heaven and hell do not exist…they are metaphors,” the book never tries to substitute a dogmatic belief system of its own. It is purposefully written in a way that is wide open to reader interpretation (in the necessary section called “How to Use this Book,” Byrne writes that “the pictures in this book will explain what the text obscures. The text is merely a distraction, a set of brakes, a device to get you to look at the pictures for longer than you would ordinarily.”) Cool. It is, in sum, a weirdly fascinating and inspiring book about books and how we rely on words and icons to sustain our faith. And like Comedy by the Numbers, it also got my creative engines running at full speed, producing new story ideas involving the supernatural.

***
If you are disappointed because I didn’t specifically recommend a HORROR book to read, why not drop by my excessively annotated list of “Must-Have Horror Anthologies” that was published recently in the Horror Fiction News Network’s “Reading Room”? There’s plenty there for your reader’s eyes to chew on till next time.
http://readingroom.horrorfictionnews.com/

Have you ever read Thomas Wiloch? If not, maybe you should. Don’t just take my word for it. Thomas Ligotti says Wiloch is writing “what deserve to be included among the best prose poems ever written in any language.” And like Ligotti, Wiloch has been quietly working away in relative obscurity in his own “niche” for two decades, developing a one-of-a-kind approach to a form he almost entirely owns. Wiloch writes surrealist short-short pieces, often no longer than a page long, that are as philosophical as they are whimsical, as clever as they are poetic, and as disturbing as they are intelligent — easy to read prose-poems and vignettes that pull language together as tight as a pirate’s knot on an iron anchor.

We don’t see books by Thomas Wiloch very often, but his latest book, Screaming in Code, is a great introduction to what he’s all about, enhanced with whimsical photocollages generously contributed by the author himself on virtually every page. It’s a slim chapbook, 58 pages perfect bound, printed nicely with a glossy color cover (whose only flaw, perhaps, is the thin paper stock used for the book cover). If you’re a fan of flash fiction, short-shorts, or prose poems, you’ll like what Wiloch is screaming (though often with a tongue in cheek or with a gentle whisper).

Screaming in Code assembles 35 new pieces by Wiloch, launching off with the clever instructional guide, “How to Read this Book” — a brief and comedic introduction which parodies the label commonly found on those little brown medicine bottles. Its warning (“Do not exceed 8 prose poems in 24 hours or read for more than 10 days”) suggests that these capsules of fiction are not to be popped like pills, but savored like everlasting hard candies. If not, Wiloch writes, then “In case of accidental overdose, take a warm TV show to induce vomiting.” Writers often take easy jabs at television, but this playful short parody (whose ending I’ve unfortunately given away) makes a poignant meta-comment about how Wiloch sees his art, pulling in big topics like education, mass culture and media literacy along the way, all in less than seventy-five words. This clever opener both acknowledges and dispenses with any notion that these stories are designed for “short attention span” reading; they are deceptively easy to consume, and sadly, we do need to be taught how to read work like this because they’ve become so unfamiliar to today’s media saturated audiences.

If I’m reading too much into this one piece, it’s because many of the stories in Screaming in Code seem only to be whimsically humorous musings upon first read, but upon re-reading, their deeper existential messages and subversive literary meanings creep up on you. In my favorite in the book, “Tell Me I’m Wrong,” we listen to a narrator making an argument that gets more and more disturbing (and yet funny) as it develops, beginning with a very scientific hypothesis (that the human body is not composed mostly of water, but of atoms and orbiting particles…in other words, mostly nothing)…and then precedes to use this logic to plead his innocence in a crime. I don’t want to say more, because I’d give the whole thing away, but it’s a brilliant twist of logic and language that made me laugh, made me nod, and made me wish I’d written such an ingenious little story. Most of the stories in Screaming in Code got the same reaction out of me. And the ideas stuck with me for so long after I’d read them that days later I’d return to the book and read them again, encountering nuances I hadn’t realized were there lurking in the writing all along.

In “The Performers,” we’re told about all the strange plans a performance artist has for a bowl of blood, only to learn about another artist’s even darker intentions. In “The Corpse Who Went for a Walk,” we get a little anecdote about a dead body who cavalierly pays a visit to a convenience store to get “some air freshener…maybe a couple of magazines” only to have the tables turned on him. In “Tiny White Skulls” we’re given a catalog of all the fun uses that human bone can be put to. These are horror stories as much as they are absurdist parables. All of them are no longer than they need to be. All of them are brilliant.

The title, Screaming in Code, suggests that the book might be a work of cyberpunk, but it’s probably more accurate to say this book is about existential horror: the title is a statement about the limits of language, and how we struggle to connect and communicate in a world where, really, the only thing that passes between us is letters, digits, symbols, and code. Writers like Wiloch don’t just scream in code — they bathe in it like a performance artist with a peculiar bowl of blood — and if they seem to be screaming, it’s no so much in caution as it is so that you’ll pay more attention to the meanings it harbors and the mysteries it holds.

Maybe we should be paying more attention to Thomas Wiloch, too. Because he is certainly paying attention to us.

I’ve been dying to get the word out about three intriguing (and vastly different) titles before they fall off the literary radar.

First up is John Edward Lawson’s new poetry collection, The Troublesome Amputee. I wrote the introduction to this book, which I have to say is one of the weirdest and goriest collections of literary poetry I’ve ever read. Lawson, a writer at the forefront of the “bizarro” movement, really comes of age as a poet in this collection, which features topics ranging from the most successful scatological poem I’ve ever read (a piece about zombies tongues that travel in the sewers (“Will Work for Food”)) to an ingenious catalog of the ugly side of famous comic book super heroes (“Marvels of Horror”). At turns audacious, at others hilarious — and always surprisingly inventive — this book really disturbed and disgusted me in that creepy way that I like so much. And that’s saying a lot. The Troublesome Amputee is a generous collection of Lawson’s work, clocking in at 96 pages, and revealing a wide range of poetic talent. If you’re truly looking for something different, get this trade paperback book for $8.95 from Raw Dog Screaming Press.

I love fast-paced, well-plotted psychological thrillers, but nothing prepared me for the one-two punch of Jeff Strand’s remarkably tight new novel, Pressure. This book goes places I wish more thrillers would go: into the dark and twisted pathways of the mind, exploring the boundaries of what we take for consensus reality. Strand — known primarily as a humorist — here takes off the funny gloves to deliver a fatal body blow with all seriousness. Pressure is essentially about the tension between two childhood friends, as one of them turns increasingly, morbidly…different. And yet the bond remains, even as Strand ratchets up the dread and things seriously take a turn for the worse. You can’t help but identify with the very human protagonist and his escalating trouble with his old friend in this story. It’s a great example of the “edgy” thriller, one in which the lines between the moral and the taboo, the innocent and the guilty, are always palpably felt in the emotional rollercoaster ride of the story. The writing is as sharp — surgical sharp — and the pace is pitch perfect. I loved it. Get your quality hardcover edition right away from Earthling Publications .

Finally, I want to recommend an offbeat book that’s a year old, and probably a flash in the pan of the literary scene, but one that in my opinion should not be overlooked. A lot of people I know enjoy Tom Robbins‘ quirky novels (like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, or Jitterbug Perfume) for their wild play with language and humorous, whimsical approach to the universe they create. In this book, Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins, you get what you love about Robbins but in an unusual presentation, along with many welcome and refreshing surprises. The book is really just a collection of ephemera, featuring batches of travel essays, tributes to celebrities, critiques, short-shorts, poems, song lyrics and interview responses — mostly reprints culled from a wide variety of magazine publications that you might not have read before or cared about. I didn’t expect to really give a darn about Robbins’ opinion of, say, Jennifer Jason Leigh, or, say, his musings during a visit to an antiques shop in Montana, but after the first sentence of each piece in this book I couldn’t stop reading. His love of language perpetually won me over — it’s contagious and fascinating — and even when I found myself disagreeing with his politics or his treatment of women, I still found myself laughing or subscribing to his idealism. It’s as though he realizes that these short essays are not as heavy with significance as his (already rather “light”) novels, so he simply enjoys the wordplay and the whimsical musing for its own sake. Although there is very little horror in this book, some of the pieces do have a dark side, and I think it’s fair to claim that Robbins is a fantasist. There’s plenty of dark stuff to be found in the lyrics of “Honky Tonk Astronaut” or the poem, “Triplets” (with lines like, “I went to Satan’s house./It was supposed to be an Amway party./I wanted one of those hard as hell steak knives.”) And if you enjoy my “Blather” department in The Goreletter, I have a strong feeling you’ll be entertained by this book (I mean, one entry in Wild Ducks is simply dedicated to Robbins’ love of the letter Z, for crying out loud). Wild Ducks Flying Backward was published by Bantam in Sept 2005 to a mild reaction by mainstream critics, but even though there is some unevenness to it, I think it’s a pretty solid book, thick with think pieces, loaded with laughs. You can still find it on amazon.com for under $10.

Meet “Bob the Angry Flower,” Stephen Notley’s outrageous main character in his comic strip by the same name. Bob is a pissed off sunflower — that icon of happiness and sunshine. But Bob’s disposition isn’t sunny, sappy, or sugary — he’s angry as hell. This embodies Notley’s approach to the form: he turns what we assume about popular culture icons inside-out and upside-down, in the process challenging our worldview. And it makes for a very entertaining, thought-provoking read.

Dog Killer — his latest collection of comics — is rife with wry political commentary and subversive play, but it’s also an appealing work of dark surrealism. In Bob’s world, the sky hails eyeballs and the local furniture store sells chairs made of human skulls. Bob follows his shadow underground, only to discover a Starbucks at the end of the cavernous journey. Bob slays ghosts with a samurai sword, and begs to know why they are haunting him (“Stop…killing…us!” is their answer!). Notley’s sly approach has got a knock-out underground power to it: Notley plays freely with form, experiments with structure, and just takes no prisoners in his attack on conventional truth and habitual ways of seeing. In this book’s introduction, Ted Rall describes “Notley’s rageful ranting” as revealing a “tragic honesty” about the American universe through some “pretty scary allegory” that’s “grim” even when it’s optimistic. “This brutal appraisal of the human condition,” Rall writes, is “never crueler than when it’s turned inward, [and this] bugs the hell out of people.” It’s courageous alternative art. Sounds a lot like what I enjoy about horror fiction.

So who is Bob? Why is he angry? Why floral? Hard to say, but he’s one of the more original characters you’ll find in the genre. Bob is, well, a sunflower embodying the morphed personality of Sam Kinison and Denis Leary, hopped up on some strange mixture of Starbucks, psychedelics, and anabolic steroids. He reminds me of a poster I once saw, called “Defiance,” which featured a tiny mouse snarling and flipping a middle finger at the eagle descending upon it from above with its dangerous talons. That’s Bob: defiance, personified. Which might explain why you haven’t met him before — Notley’s character goes against the grain of most cartoons on the comix page. So thank goodness for books like Dog Killer, the fifth collection of BTAF in print.

Bob often has a message, but I can imagine that he often puzzles readers who don’t quite understand just how deep this defiance goes. Take the title strip, for example, Dog Killer.” [viewable online] All that happens here is that Bob shows up at the doorstep of a white man in a suit, collar opened, head heavy, eyes evasive, saying “Thanks for coming.” Bob shoulders his shotgun and says, “I understand. You need your dog put down and your not man enough to do it.” Bob goes in the back yard, pets the sick dog for four panels, soothing it with “good boys” … and then blows its head open (the extreme closeup on the furry skull bursting is so excessive, you can only make out the fanged upper palate in the carnage). Then Bob blows on his finger in the end panel: “Ooh, I burnt my finger!”

Most people, I imagine, might call this gratuitous violence. A juvenile thrill, akin to pulling the wings off a fly. But as most savvy readers realize, there’s more to such a spectacle of guts than first meets the eye. For one thing, there’s drama in the suspenseful soothing of the dog. This one page is worth a thousand Old Yellers. Then there’s the ugly truth exposed by the blast. It’s everything Old Yeller never had the guts to do. This is accented by Bob’s exposure of the pettiness of human pain (“I burnt my finger!”). And an attack on the lack of backbone in much of the middle class, refusing to both soothe those who are failing and to get their hands dirty when there’s an uncomfortable problem that needs to be solved.

In the back of the book, Notley gives excellent annotations which read like an insightful and witty “director’s commentary” track on a DVD. Notley’s discussion of “Dog Killer” reveals that it’s based on a true story from childhood. He also manages to unveil his general approach to the comic as a whole: “Just as [Bob]’s holding the dog’s head down and coaxing it, I’m holding the reader’s head down until that moment I make them look at a dog’s head getting pulped. Sometimes you have to take cherished notions into the back yard and blow their heads off, and you can’t look away when you do it.” I couldn’t agree more.

Such thematic depth can be found in even the most silly or bizarre entries in the book — all of them force you to look at something in a new light, from a skewed angle. There’s a lot of meat and grizzle to chew on here, in 158 pages of high energy drawing. I think this book will appeal to horror fans very much. But Bob the Angry Flower eludes genre, ranging from direct political commentary (a number of the pieces in Dog Killer refer explicitly to the 2004 Presidential Election) to surrealism (in one entry, Bob awakens as a bug and cursing Kafka and then transplanting his floral head onto a clone in a gory, pitiless act of decapitation) to science-fiction (Bob makes killer robots) and the gross-out (Bob sticks his fingers in the squirming maggots of a dead bird over and over again in one strip — and that’s the whole bit). I am hardly an expert on the graphic fiction genre, but I think it’s safe to say that Notley’s approach to sequential art is incomparable. The manic and raw drawing style, the play with titles and captions, and the sheer audacity of the premises all reminded me a little bit of the expressionist flourishes of Jhonen Vasquez’s brilliantly sick comic, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, but without the Goth sensibility. Skewed, dark, twisted, smart, sick, scary, witty…even these words don’t do it justice. That’s why it’s art. And why it’s angry.

You gotta see it for yourself. Dog Killer is Stephen Notley’s fifth compilation of BTAF cartoons, but the first American collection (his work originates in Canada). It’s bound to be a hit. The trade paperback is hitting stores this June from Tachyon Publications, for $12.95. Get it while it’s hot-headed.

Few realize that the term “anthology” — which we use to denote collections of short stories by different authors, usually following a shared theme or genre — comes for the Greek word for “flower-gathering.” Corpse Blossoms, the first volume in a series of anthologies from the new horror publisher, Creeping Hemlock Press, is more than just a collection of some dead leaves — it’s like an amazingly fulfilling chilled salad. Or should I say a very full, chilling salad? Either way, it’s fiction with an earthy, dark flavor in every bite. And though I’m more than satisfied by the meal, I can’t wait till they toss together their next dish.

Edited by Julia and RJ Sevin, Corpse Blossoms will immediately strike you as a different kind of horror anthology the second you hold it in your hands. If an anthology is a flower-gathering, then the editors have arranged these twisted clippings into a very distinctive bouquet. First off, there’s something inherently gentle about the package — from the charcoal image of the funeral flower on its gray front cover to the high quality green bindings and pastel cover with a copper foil stamp. Usually I don’t judge a book by its cover, but when I examine a new publisher’s first offering, I am interested in the investment they put into the quality and I can’t help but judge whether or not they really know what they’re doing based on the book’s production value, in addition to its general aesthetic unity. This book sends a message: the stories you’re about to read are high quality. And the book has a distinctive character. Corpse Blossoms evinces a soft horror mood that’s really somewhat eerie — like a thing found abandoned in a mortuary, yet quivering with a life all its own.

So do the stories match the quality and character of the book? Are they, in the publisher’s words, “tales of quiet terror and screaming fear by some of the finest authors in the field”? Indeed, for the most part, they are, and though there were many fine horror anthologies published this past year (indeed, we may be experiencing a horror anthology renaissance), Corpse Blossoms holds its own as one of the finest horror anthologies to come out this season.

One of the most interesting elements of the book is the dictum in the foreword, which begs the reader to “read these exceptional stories in the order that they appear for full effect…this is no lottery.” Corpse Blossoms has twenty-four stories, many by longstanding and reputable writers in the horror genre (Gary Braunbeck, Tom Piccirilli, Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, Steve Rasnic Tem) and many by writers who have made a noticeably significant splash in the horror scene since the turn of the Millennium (Kealan Patrick Burke, Scott Nicholson, Darren Speegle, Bev Vincent, Nick Mamatas, Steve Vernon, Brian Freeman). The fiction is generally harder in tone than you might expect, given the gentility of the packaging. In the stories themselves, the “quiet terror” usually stems from a character whose reality has started splitting apart at the seams, and the writers ratchet up the creep-outs until everything erupts in a moment of “screaming fear” — and for some, explosive gore — in an emotionally powerful way.

I can’t talk about all of the tales, but let me share my thoughts about three that really stuck with me, to give you a sense of the book’s range.

One of the weirdest pieces in this is collection is “The Last Few Curls of Gut Rope” by Steve Vernon. The title is a tad bit misleading, because Vernon’s tale is really a surrealist piece rather than a gorefest (though you won’t be entirely disappointed in the climax if a little gut-wrenching splat is what you’re seeking when you read this one). What makes “Gut Rope” surreal? Well, if you’ve ever read my short-short story, “Domestic Fowl,” then this is “Domestic Fowl” to the 20th power. It’s about a guy who orders eggs at a restaurant and is served a live squawking chicken (“You asked for eggs,” the waitress says, “but the chicken comes first.”) And then it just gets weirder and weirder, playing off the familiar chicken-and-egg formula by “dishing out” many absurdist moments and encounters, until it reaches its bizarrely-feathered conclusion. Vernon is gaining a reputation for his humorous voice, and though this story does not disappoint in that regard, it also reveals a layer of psychological depth underpinning his fiction that is getting deeper and more profound than in the past. It’s one of his best tales yet.

Another wildly-imagined contribution to the collection comes from Bentley Little, whose opening paragraph is probably the most creatively hilarious of the book:

He found it in a shack in the desert, a horrible thing of jellyfish and claws, scales and squid, bound into shape by strands of dark kelpy seaweed. It was sitting in the center of the rotted wood floor, and under his gaze it shifted, moved, tried to slink away beneath a sandy bench, all the while making a hideous squeaking squelching sound.

‘Dad?’ he said.

This is from Little’s “Finding Father,” a quirky and emotionally disturbing tale about a trucker who is hunting down his father, who, it seems, is leaving a trail for him to follow in the form of bathroom stall graffiti. The premise of this one is a little hard to swallow, but that’s almost universally true of Bentley Little’s short stories. Little always ambitiously pushes the envelope of horror fiction and writes horror with a contagious sense of frenetic glee that inevitably takes you on such a ride that you not only forgive the absurdity behind his stories, but also gladly join him in his playground of the unreal. This story had me at “jellyfish and claws.” They latched onto me and I went along for an outrageous descent into terror.

I love stories like these; tales that go over the top in a quest for unconscious thrills. Their unsettling humor pushes you over the edge and into some psychic state of disbelief akin to madness. Corpse Blossoms is at its best when it delves into the psychological — rather than supernatural — side of horror. And it doesn’t just go for the outre…or the darkly funny. Many of these stories, particularly those early in the book, evoke the eerie mood of dark fantasy, working to unhinge the reader’s confidence in conventional reality. And the book hosts some shining treasures in this regard. For example, Kealan Patrick Burke’s “Empathy” — one of the longer pieces in the book — ratchets the terror up in sharp increments that build like the tension of a lug wrench tightening a nut bit by bit up to its breaking point. In this exceptionally well-developed story, a man is so emotionally scarred by watching a torture scene on the internet (just out of curiosity), that he can’t stop envisioning the visceral scene playing out again and again, especially on his family. Burke effectively gets us inside the mind of the haunted and obsessed, as the protagonist’s nightmares seep progressively into his waking life. “Empathy,” while somewhat familiar in its plot of traumatic “repetition-compulsion,” is one of the strongest pieces in the collection, written with a rock solid narrative voice and a masterful control over psychological suspense. It’s certainly worthy of an award for best scary novella of the year.

If Corpse Blossoms is a gourmet salad, then the leaves have an occasional brown spots here and there, but that happens when the kitchen doesn’t sanitize out all the flavor. I encountered a few typos as I read Corpse Blossoms (“at” for “ate” in one climactic scene really threw me off), but the fact is, I’ve seen far worse mistakes made by established pro publishers before. In the back of the book, the editors write about their own feelings about each of their story selections — I found this very insightful, lending even more character and editorial panache to the book; it drove home my feeling that this is a publisher who has a strong editorial direction (though perhaps it’s a bit indulgent at times… as an author, I think I’d be mildly embarrassed if readers were explicitly told that my story was sent back several times for a revision, even though that’s a natural part of the process. And I will warn you that sometimes the chatter about the tales in this appendix gives away key elements of the story, so hold off on reading the ingredients list until you’ve finished the bite).

Finally, it’s worth noting that the publishers of this book were impacted by Hurricane Katrina. The fact that they were able to put together such a fine collection and launch a new quality publishing line while being dislocated and traumatized by that terrible chaos is not only admirable, it’s miraculous. As they note in the book’s postscript, this project “served as something to take our minds off of mold-covered walls and ceilings collapsed…something on which to focus, a goal, a signpost, a destination.” This passion is evident everywhere in the book, and if it was their destination, then, well, they’ve certainly arrived! Editors with this kind of dedication to good storytelling and quality publishing really deserve the support of readers who love munching on a good salad of fiction that has a real bite to it. This review has been lengthy, but I’ve only shown you a small part of the menu and shared a few morsels. I highly recommend you order a large bowl of Corpse Blossoms and sample this anthology for yourself.

Corpse Blossoms is a $40 hardcover limited to 500 trade copies, 500 signed copies, and 26 lettered leather copies available from the publisher at Creeping Hemlock Press or from your friendly favorite horror bookseller

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Press & Praise

[Arnzen uses] clever plot twists that ratchet up the terror and tension, and keep the reader both unbalanced and guessing just what will happen next while keeping the reader thoroughly engrossed within the story at all times. [The B**chfight is] an enormously entertaining modern tale of terror perhaps destined to become a future classic…it receives my highest recommendation. This is a book you will not want to miss.